Latin Meeting 2011-07-14

IDN Variant Project — Latin Case Study Team (2011-07-14)
Minutes of meetings

Attendees

Jothan Frakes, Andrzej Bartosiewicz, Cary Karp, Will Shorter, Nadya Morozova, Wil Tan, Francisco Arias, Kim Davies, Andrew Sullivan.
Apologies: Giovanni Seppia

Previous Action Items

1.1 All team members to respond prompty to poll on when to conduct future meetings (due 2011-06-24)
1.2 All team members to fill out a Statement of Interests (due 2011-07-15)
1.3 Cary Karp to provide a starting classification for the types of "Variant" as thy relate to Latin from existing material (ie Homographic Variant Character/String, Homophone Variant String, Orthographic Variant, etc.) (due date 2011-07-07)
1.4 All team members to read the draft questions, and identify (a) something you can provide an answer so. (if, please answer); (b) something you think is good but should have an answer; (c) missing and should be added or considered; (d) should be removed or identified as out of scope, irrelevant, or not applicable in Latin. (due date 2011-07-07)
1.5 Kim Davies and Jothan Frakes to develop a draft workplan for review at the first telephone meeting (due 2011-07-07)

Discussion

1. Statements of Interest. Action for Kim to post statements of interests to the wiki.
2. Discussion of draft questions and answers. Jothan extended the deadline on action item 1.4 on that item until 2011-07-19. Action for Kim to resend background material to the list. Will Shorter noted that VeriSign has been working on detailed responses to some of the questions, and noted they are complex questions with details answers. He noted some concerns on the shortness of time available. Cary raised concerns about the nature of the questions, and Andrew Sullivan said that they are supposed to be guiding questions — the kinds of issues staff think need some sort of consideration — not don't necessarily need to be answered specifically. Jothan reiterated the request to review the questions. Wil Tan expressed concern regarding question 3.1 and terminology.
3. Definitions. (35m) Noted the expertise the group has with IDNs, and gave some examples of definitions that may be considered. Hope to define as many different variant situations, so there is a common vocabulary for those who use the team's findings. Should give some time to talk through overlaps with Greek and Cyrillic. Cary noted that no-one had responded to the document he sent to the list, and then another discussion on the VIP discussion list suggests going in a different direction (i.e. Patrik's questions). Cary noted the list of PVALID characters will reveal the scope of the problem, and in that list there is 1-2 possible variants, and beyond that there are contextual issues so its not clear there will be much agreement beyond that. Jothan noted the desire to get Cary's concerns documented. Jothan noted Wikipedia has some good information on the Latin script, and wondered if there was some value [in using it]. Cary noted there is a more stable academic resource at http://www.ethnologue.com/. Jothan pointed to the work of Unicode at http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/confusables.jsp noting that it is will beyond the scope of what the working group needs to analyse (e.g. "1" to "l" confusability). Andrew Sullivan said that it would be really helpful if visual confusability, either intra- or infrascript, is a concern but it not a concern in LDH. Need to identify a stopping rule as to when visual confusability is a concern or not. Jothan said that we want to say "the genie is out of the bottle" and draw a line under that, and solve that. Cary said that we have "organized/organised" are not the same, and there is an issue as to whether they care considered the same. Orthographic variation is being considered by other groups as the "essence of variants". Noted "naive/naïve" which goes from an LDH label to an IDN label. Jothan expressed a desire to capture these kinds of examples in the group's work product.

New and Continuing Action Items

Next Meeting

Thursday, 28 July 2011: 1600 UTC, 9am US Pacific, 12pm US Eastern, 6pm Central Europe.